MANHATTAN CRUDE : in an age (and a war) consumed with Purity, the dying Dr Dawson's gift of crowd-sourced 'impure' natural penicillin was not just a global lifesaver. It was also a window into a new way of looking at the world.

Monday, January 6, 2014

(Martin) Henry Dawson left no private papers, so his biography must be one of deeds not words.

It actually suits the man : he was a natural history type scientist, not a natural philosophy type.He lived in the material world , not in the thrusting scientific elite's world of verbal jabs and written rhetorical skills.

By all contemporary accounts, it was the lack of actual photos and movies of actual deaths (from anywhere inside the vast numbers of German concentration , POW and mass elimination camps) that prevented the many public verbal and written accounts of the Holocaust from being believed while it was happening.

After all, anti-Semitic acts and talk actually went up , not down, in the Anglo-American world during WWII.

Many in the Allied camp - perhaps 25 % - seriously blamed the "Jew-dominated FDR government" for creating the war, while many others accused Jews of shirking front line combat to remain home as war profiteers instead.

So it was the extensive newsreels of British or American troops examining the dead and dying , most mere skeletons, in the western concentration camps that finally got through to the Home Front doubters about the millions killed in the invisible eastern extermination camps.

I suspect that it was less the fact of their deaths ( seventy million had already died from the war worldwide) than the pictures of their starved condition that finally got through to people.

All the detail-filled verbal and written contemporary accounts of the Holocaust , even when they came from the lips of people like Churchill (not really regarded by anyone, not even Nazis, as 'a stooge of the Jews') were dismissed as mere artifacts of the will and the mind .

All the world's population had six long years to become used to the near total disconnect between what they could actually see at work or all around them, versus the public (verbal/written) propaganda told about it.

But the mid to late 1945 newsreels were too long, too many and too varied to appear easily doctored -- they were artifacts of the real world and of matter and they were readily and strongly believed.

What better proof then for my thesis that The mental Will might have started the war on all sides, but that it was The material World that actually won out in the end....?

Friday, January 3, 2014

Sir Charles Lyell as intellectual godfather to Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will".Who would have known ?But it was Sir Charles, in a 1863 book, who first summarily dismissed materialism as a philosophy with a single memorable phrase : "MIND OVER MATTER".He opined that all the evidence from evolutionary progress ('ever onward to those broad sunlit uplands') indicated that the mind was gradually but steadily winning dominion over mere matter obstacles.Oh yes, what Canadian can forget that 'dominion' was word de rigueur for English language intellectuals in the sunny 1860s ?'Mind over Matter' : Lyell's memorable catchphrase came to sum up Modernity's essence for the populations and leaders of the Allied, Axis and Neutral camps during WWII.So, in its spirit, on the very first day of the war, headlines all the world over (incorrectly) blatted "German tanks maul Polish horses".But in the dying days of the European phase of the war no such headlines came out, that by the Spring of 1945 , now "Polish horses haul German tanks".The tanks were disguised as Polish peasant haywagons, en route to their last role as hull down pillboxes in the battle for the German heartland.The Germans had no more gasoline for the tanks and in any case had run out of engine spare parts to re-start them.German morale was still high..... but motor oil supplies were very low.In Japan : ditto, ditto.There legions of schoolkids and grandmothers destroyed all the sacred pine trees they could find, all to extract the basis of very little, very crude, airplane gasoline from their roots.The German tankers were desperate to get their tanks into hidden position before the Soviets arrived, but the Polish horses took their good old time, re-fueling along the sides of the road, eating the Spring's first tender shoots.The war - for Germany at least - was no longer moving along at Man's Blitzkrieg tempo, but rather at Nature's own pace.'Matter over Mind' , at last ....

About Me

I write, urgently, about our world's painfully too-slow transition into a new era, the Age of Entanglement. Ironically - and typically - this supposed new era actually represents a modified return to the world's oldest philosophy.
For the ancients almost universally saw all life as thoroughly entangled, saw all lifeforms as dining together at a common table - open commensality on a global scale.
Today’s science demonstrates that for us to survive on Earth, humans must sustain the lifeforms that in turn sustain us . So, for example, for us to kill the ocean’s upper reaches will soon remove the very oxygen we need to live.
And economics confirms we can not afford to replace the tens of trillions of dollars of free goods that Nature effortlessly provides humanity annually : there is no “Mars Plan B”.